What will you be doing at Armageddon?

That's the question for the Killing The Grizzly Art Contest.  So get drawing and writing, folks!  It's a chance to not only get a page in a sharp new anthology -- they're actually offering a token payment for publication rights. 

Yeah, yeah, it's only $25.00, but that's better than you get from most people putting together an anthology!  Most of 'em don't even get you a free ad in the book for clients to find you.  Even a little $25.00 is better than ANY other anthology (you know, those clowns with their "we'll offer you two free copies for slaving away all day") -- and these guys are just getting started as a real powerhouse company.  Join in now and be there when they can really offer what your amazing art and writing deserve!

Internships With Me

Now I've had a couple of students serving internships with me from the MCAD, I've had a chance to think about what I can really offer and what I need out of it.

If you're short of time and money and just want to get to work in any end of this industry, consider that I can offer you the same training as a college, with fewer costs in time and money.

Online option:  only three students at a time. 

Required programs: Skype, GIMP and OpenOffice required. ComicLife optional.

The details for a one-month course; you must be a legal adult:

1. Costs for either on-line or in-place option:  $4500.00 Paypal (with additional fees) or money order.

In-place option:

2.  If you opt for training with me directly, you will find your own place to live while training, and feed yourself.

3.  You organize and pay for your own travel.  If you are late because you didn't take into consideration the distances or bus routes, you may not change your schedule; you'll have a lot of travel to do in this business and you can't be late for anything.

4.  Courses will consist of five hours per day, with an additional lunch break, from Monday through Friday.  You will have weekends to yourself, but you will be expected to finish all assignments.

5.  The first two weeks will be drawing, writing and comics layout.  The second week will be training in open source programs, including the art manipulation program GIMP, the layout program OpenOffice. The final week will be networking, accounting, marketing, small press publishing, cooking and health hints for authors, etc.  

Be prepared for a LOT of work, and no pity if you don't get it done (you'll never get any from a editor).  Time at the beaches and in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula can be earned by finishing projects in time for weekends.  Since I seldom get out to see them myself, I will be willing to provide transportation so I can see them too. However, I am not a hang-out buddy, so don't expect it.  Please don't bring up personal or family problems, unless we're just gabbing on beach-runs -- then anything's fair.

At the end of this course, you should have the tools you need to go out and work in the comics industry with fewer expensive or scary surprises.  It will not gain you recognition in academia, unless you think associating with an old-time comics author will do so.  It may not necessarily open any doors for you, but it will give you the tools for being prepared to do so yourself.

You will have the right to contact me any time in the future with reasonable, well-thought-out questions about anything having to do with comics, as well as access to my extensive colleague and reader community.  Your performance will count. If you make a bad impression during the course, you can redeem yourself by future life performance; I do not burn bridges, and people can change. Points are given for honest effort.

First person who signs up and pays for this gets to take me out to to the Clallam Bay Inn for fish n' chips and beer; no holds barred on the evening's conversation or questions.

Shell Shocked In Proseland

Went to the PNWA Convention yesterday.  God knows why; I've spent literal decades being sneered at when I say I do comics (with that little cringe and eye-twitch). Admittedly, I'm shell-shocked (for those of you into psychological terms, that's PTSD), I even titled my little talk Eyes and Hands, and gave it a real under-the-radar tone, to hope to at least fool a couple of people into coming in and seeing what I did.

Surprised was I when three people showed up, eager to hear everything I had to say or maunder about on.  One guy was even using Comic Life to create fumetti with his gaming figures, and doing a perfectly readable and shareable job of it.

After the talk, stayed around for dinner, and found -- to my utter surprise -- that all these writers were surprised there was a comics panel at the show and were sorry they'd missed it.

All I can figure is the old farts who thought comics were an Inferior Art Form are dying off, and thank all the Manga people who are running around in love with words and pictures.  A whole generation of older writers are seeing that what we do is valid.

AND -- for those of you artists who are trying to find writers, these people are NOT embarrassed to admit they are Prose Genre.  They will be perfectly happy to do you a script for a nice payment and then go away without demanding rights or artwork.  These are script jockies and screenwriters, nice hard-working people.

Let's hook up our industries; artists and a very available pool of professional script writers.  I want to see what happens.

BUT:  there was only ONE sales outlet -- previous consignment through Barnes and Noble. Because B&N owes me money, their shop at the convention lost my consignment form.  Yup, actually NO other way to sell books -- a one-distributor gateway they keep locked.  Why do they let themselves be treated like this?

Killing the Grizzly

Neat things going on with my work and that of a number of other comics authors: http://www.killingthegrizzly.com/the-desert-peach-by-donna-barr/

I'm letting these guys do what they do best -- promotion and finding the money. I'm hoping to be able to be getting out of the processing of my work and the marketing yada yada and back to actually concentrating on writing and drawing.

I plan to take all the files I've processed and sending DVD copies to the San Diego State University Collection of my work. Then, any publisher who wants a copy can be directed there, and for whatever fees SDSU requires, obtain a copy of the files for future processing, after coming to contractual agreements with me.  It can be hands off for me: I can turn over all my original art and let them begin to sell it.

Because We CAN

Had to leave this letter at Jian Ghomeshi's Q:

Dan Clowes is a great drawn book author ("artist/writer/letterer/colorist/owns copyright,"), and a nice guy to boot.

But here are the dumbest questions he and I and ALL of us drawn book authors are asked by interviewers, with my answers (first heaving huge sigh):

"Did you draw that TOO?" (No, elves on crack did).

"How long did it take you to do a page?" (WTF does this one mean?  My answer: 52 years -- and I've been publishing since 1986.)

"Why do you do comics?"  ("Because I can write and I can draw.")

"Why did you draw it that way?" (Because I CAN)

"Who's your inspiration?" (WTF? Do ALL prose people think we're tracing other artists?  I was inspired by ancient anonymous tomb art, specifically Egyptian, Mayan and Scythian).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE start writing smarter, more uncommon questions than this, the ones we all get tormented with.  Interviews are like programming:  GIGO.

Poor Dan....at least he doesn't get invited to the idiot eternal "Women in Comics" panels. But I would have loved to have heard some really good questions asked him, instead of the SOS we all get tormented with.  I'm about to do a t-shirt, I swear, with those questions on it....

Educating Hunters, One Brain Cell At A Time

Just sent this to President Walter "Bud" Pidgeon, Jr., head of the USSA

You can contact him too, with YOUR favorite comics sites!  At: bpidgeon@ussportsmen.org

"Hi, Bud! Hi folks!

Just read about the action of the USSA at: Ellen Degeneres

Since you are being introduced to comic books, I thought you'd enjoy my long-running comic book series: The Desert Peach

Here's another one I heartily recommend: The Virgin Project.

And we can't leave out: Cuckoo.

Or the smashing: Colin Upton's World

And we can't leave out a WORLD of fun comics: Prism Comics

Welcome to wonderful world of comic books! It's more books, more kinds of books -- and more people worldwide -- than you can imagine. I recommend you look at all these sites. And imagine how many more there are.

Donna Barr

Regular ASPCA contributor"

Broken Heart, Small Soul

This isn't going to do any good, but I have to do it anyway, because every once in a while I have to try again. It's worn a hard rut of sorrow in my heart, and at this point I know I'm never going to get over it.  So if you've run into me and found me snappish, narrow-minded and sour, read the title on this post.

Soon after he went missing, I dreamt he met me at the foot of a street going straight up from the west end of the Fremont bridge in Seattle.  There is no such street.  I've even checked a Fremont street in Bremerton, and a Fremont neighborhood in Tacoma.  Thinking of him the other day, and discovered there was a Fremont neighborhood in Las Vegas.

If you can tell me what happened to him -- and prove it -- it's $250.00 bucks for you.  If you can bring him back alive, it's $500.00. 

There.  I've got it out of my system for another session of weeks or years.  And don't tell me to Get Over It; a local poke-into-your-life wanna-be spiritualist leader told me "We (him and his just-as-bad partner) can cure grief and guilt."  He's lucky I didn't slap him silly on the spot.